


Some Unspoken Thing

by KanuKoris



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Bickering, Enemies to Lovers, Everyone catches feelings, F/M, Profanity, Sexual Tension, The Captain and Max are shits to each other, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:28:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21676777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KanuKoris/pseuds/KanuKoris
Summary: It's been years since he last saw her, but one thing has remained constant. The Vicar has always found Captain Hawthorne simply... infuriating.
Relationships: The Captain/Maximillian DeSoto
Comments: 17
Kudos: 94





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to write this but then I did because I'm trash.
> 
> Spoilers for one of the endings, but also I took liberties and rearranged plot points of the game.

_“As a reward for his part in her courageous rescue, the Adjutant invited the vicar known as Max to become one of the leaders of the Order of Scientific Inquiry. But Max had no interest in serving any organization – let alone the OSI, which he knew would never tolerate his “heretical” theories. Instead, he attempted to minister to the people of Byzantium. They rejected his ideas, being far too satisfied with their own material comforts. Disillusioned, Max gave up and left the city. He was never heard from again.”_

_***_

The Vicar was walking through the valley, a tossball stick slung over his shoulder, when he felt the air around him vibrate. Every living thing in the rocky hills, which included himself and a nearby family of sprats, looked up into the sky to see a ship enter the atmosphere. Sky traffic to these parts was a regular occurence, but he and the sprats knew what the workers in the nearby colonies had forgotten. A flying machine was a marvel and the world – the deep primal senses that all creatures had – could not help but react to a miraculous thing that disturbed the natural world around them.

He continued on with a low hum reverberating in his bones that stayed inside his body the entire walk out of the valley. Perhaps it was because of this nagging disturbance he felt skin deep, that he was not surprised when he saw the land speeder parked outside of his hut. Or the woman that accompanied it.

It had been many years since he had seen her last, and somehow even with her back turned to him, encased in what looked like UDL Elite Trooper armor, he recognized her without question.

She heard him approach, reached up to remove her helmet, and turned to greet him. Despite the years apart, he was surprised by how fiercely his chest constricted when she smiled at him.

Captain Alex Hawthorne took him in with a delighted look, tucking her helmet under an arm. “Law, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

“Captain Hawthorne,” he responded simply.

She smirked, her head tilting to the side. “You’ve been a damned hard man to find, Vicar.”

He simply moved past her so he could lean his tossball stick against the side of his hut. He had a small bundle of supplies (a few tins of Saltuna, Pre-Sliced Bred, Mock Apple Cider) he set down by his door. He saw her brow furrow as he sat down on his porch chair and neglected to invite her inside.

“I’m not a Vicar anymore.”

“That’s curious. The folks ‘round here still call you ‘Vicar’. Says they come all the way to the middle of nowhere if they want some counseling.”

She looked older, he supposed they both did, and the years had settled onto her to make her look sharper. Like a knife blade honed and whetted. Whatever softness she had from emerging from seventy years of cryo-sleep, life in Halcyon had whittled away until only a steely woman remained.

He heard it in her voice too, that barb just lying underneath her dry, sardonic drawl. It glinted of danger, usually spooked people she was trying to intimidate, even as she was looking him up and down appraisingly, “Well the beard suits you, even if it ain’t OSI regulation.”

Before he could stop himself, he reached up to touch it, feeling self-conscious. Annoyed, he crossed his arms over his chest. “I think it’s very clear that I’m not a Priest with the OSI any longer. I haven’t been for awhile.”

“I didn’t think the priesthood was something you could just retire from—“

“Why are you here?”

Hawthorne lifted an eyebrow at his sternness. If he thought the peeved look on her face was tinged with a degree of hurt, he quickly shoved that thought deep down.

“Because I’ve already been to Edgewater and Byzantium and didn’t find you at either place. I even took a trip down to Tartarus, but it seems you’ve managed to keep yourself out of the Penitentiary this time ‘round.” She motioned to his hut and their surroundings. “I suppose there is some sense to you going into hiding here. You’re the hermit of Scylla now.”

He looked at her through shuttered eyes. “The Grand Plan prefers symmetry.”

She laughed, feigned a chill and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “Brrr! I should have packed warmer clothes for this kind of frigid reception.” She then sighed, seeing that none of her attempts at levity were reaching him. “Figures you still haven’t forgiven me, you stubborn bastard.”

“Why,” he repeated himself, “are you here?”

She reached up to snake a hand through her hair as she pieced together her next words. “I have a job needs doing. I need my crew back.”

He almost spat on the ground in disgust, but that would have shown he still cared more than he wanted to admit. “I’m not interested. And I’m sure if you put in enough request forms to Adjutant Akande, she’ll eventually approve you whatever cannon fodder you need.”

“This isn’t for the Board—“

“Talk to Gladys then—“

“ _Max_.”

His name landed like a soft blow in his gut. It forced him to look at her, and her eyes were so serious, so _earnest_ , it made him want to squirm on the spot.

“This is for me. It ain’t a bounty, it ain’t a contract... it’s something I got to set right. And I need your help.”

Max had only ever seen Alex Hawthorne beg once, and even in that situation she had maintained the upper hand. This felt different. She looked at him, urgent, on the road to desperate, and as close to honest and _here_ as he had ever seen her.

“Will you invite me inside?”

Even though he made her wait for a tense, drawn out moment, he opened the door and stepped aside to let her in. Whether it was the Architect’s design or some singular influence over the cosmos she possessed, it seemed predetermined that she would be stepping back into his life, and he was powerless except to obey.

***

When the Vicar had first situated himself onboard the Unreliable, he had thought his arrangement with Captain Hawthorne was comfortably mercenary. He wanted to find a translator for M. Bakonu’s journal, Hawthorne needed able-bodied crew, and he thought that made for a rather straightforward quid-pro-quo exchange.

What he hadn’t counted on was that Captain Alex Hawthorne would simply _infuriate_ him.

While Scientism didn’t hold much stock in the Old Earth religious beliefs of hell and demons and eternal damnation, after a week of traveling with the Captain, Max would have swore on Bakonu’s journal that the woman was made of pure bedevilment. He had his own secrets that he kept close to his chest, but watching as she navigated the different players of Groundbreaker station, he thought he’d never seen someone quite as slippery as Hawthorne. And he had the misfortune to deal directly with Reed Tobson in Edgewater on occasion.

It wasn’t just that she lied, though she certainly did plenty of that and with a straight face. Hawthorne could speak true words with a sardonic tone that made her motives or real feelings suspect. She could rearrange or selectively omit things she was saying so that you never got a true picture of what she meant. The Vicar thought she made herself impossible to pin down intentionally. All smoke and mirrors.

And that Law damned way she _fucking smirked_.

“But what are you fixing to do with that, ma’am? I reckon Mr. Bedford is going to miss it soon.” Parvati looked a little wide-eyed, torn between nerves and excitement over the brash actions of the Captain she had so eagerly thrown in her lot with. If Parvati had wanted to escape Edgewater for a little excitement, she was learning quickly that she had signed up for quite a lot more than ‘a little’ by joining Captain Hawthorne’s crew.

Hawthorne idly twirled Udom Bedford’s passcard in between her fingertips. She had spent more time flirting, mocking, and generally riling up the stuffy Board bureaucrat than Max thought completely necessary to lift the flight restrictions off the Unreliable. He was secretly impressed when they left the office and learned she had managed to steal his passcard in plain sight of Bedford and the Board guards, her constant bubble of conversation the distraction she needed to pick his pockets.

“Udom will catch on soon enough, but the beauty of this is he won’t be able to do a thing but stew on his own foolishness. I’ve got some correspondences from Udom darling on my personal terminal that I get the feeling he wants to keep private.”

She twirled the passcard once more before pocketing it with a bark of laughter. Max shook his head at what he thought to be quite the obscene display of pure glee over someone else’s suffering. Even if he agreed that Udom Bedford was nothing more than a bipedal sprat.

“ _Maximillian_.”

She drew out his name with a wickedness that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention. “Are you silently glowering in disapproval, Vicar?”

“Should I do it noisily?”

Max felt himself tense as Captain Hawthorne redirected all of her attention unto him. The mockery in her voice was at once sharp, and yet playful enough that he felt off-balance. Unsure if she was pressing in for the kill, or content with merely toying with him. “Oh, do go on. I’ve never been sermoned to before. I think it would be a rather enlightening experience. Tell me, how must I change my wicked ways?”

He decided he wasn’t going to be so easily provoked, and replied smoothly, “I rather suspect that despite your behavior, you have a clear sense of what you think is right and wrong. My door is always open to you if you seek spiritual counseling, but if you merely want to flaunt your criminal genius, well…” He shrugged nonchalantly. “…I’m sure the scavengers down in the Back Bays would shower you with all of the flattery your ego desires.”

The Captain’s eyebrows shot up into her hairline, the smirk on her face dropping slightly. After a pregnant pause, he saw her eyes narrow and a dangerous grin light on her face.

Despite maintaining his unruffled demeanor, Max felt like he had taken a misstep. Hawthorne was looking at him now as if she were fully paying attention to him for the first time. Calculating, measuring. Coming to some decision that put him directly into her crosshairs.

“Oh, I think I’m growing to _like you_ , Vicar.”

She made it sound like a threat.

***

Over the next few months, the Vicar came to learn that Captain Alex Hawthorne was a woman of many talents. She had an innate charisma that brought people to her side, and the growing crew of the Unreliable was testament enough to that. She radiated a competence and built a solid reputation that she was the woman to get the job done – so that every clerk, mayor, marauder or yokel on the Halcyon colony eagerly spilled their secrets, jobs and personal requests to her.

She was light on her feet and had the ability to sneak past mantisaurs and outlaw encampments.

She had a nerve that wouldn’t shake and could run headlong into a fight she was outnumbered in, and emerge from it the victor.

And oh, she knew how to get under his skin.

“So you were in prison?”

The Vicar spent most of his time onboard the Unreliable conducting his research. He socialized a little with the crew, as much was needed to be polite. While they gathered the bits and supplies needed to make passage to Fallbrook, he exercised patience and tried to commit to studying his texts.

Captain Hawthorne would drop in on him whenever she pleased, uncaring if she was distracting him from his life’s work. And she would just drop questions as blunt as an impact hammer on him, her curiosity demanding to be answered. The Vicar thought she wore rudeness like an fashionable coat.

“I was assigned… penitentiary duty for a time.”

Her eyes lit up with a wicked amusement, and the Vicar thought she was eyeing him like he was some kind of puzzle she was itching to solve.

“And what did you do while you were assigned ‘penitentiary duty’?”

“What you would expect. I did read quite a bit. I even played fifth-back for the tossball team.”

“And what did you _do_ to wind up playing tossball in prison?” She leaned over his desk, invading his space. Hawthorne used distance and closeness like anything else, a weapon to throw her opponents off-balance. “What vices did this priest fall prey to, that his Order felt the need to punish him?”

Her voice was soft, loaded. The warmth in it was like the chamber of a plasma rifle heating up, getting ready to fire. Max stared evenly back at her, and then waved a hand across the notes and books in front of him. He had been in the middle of reading another index of banned literature. Hawthorne’s eyes flickered down to the pages, and then back up to his face.

She then let out an incredulous laugh. “Leave it to you, Vicar Max, to even _sin_ in a most righteous and boring fashion. Forbidden knowledge was your downfall?” She shook her head, despairing. “I don’t think you would know fun if it came and bit you on the ass cheek.”

“I assure you my ass cheek’s sense of fun is intact. Its tastes may just be too sophisticated for some Law-dodging vagabond to appreciate.”

She ended that line of questioning with a delighted, slightly menacing, chuckle and a slithered “is that so?” that left him with the distinct feeling that he hadn’t gotten the last word.

The incident with Udom Bedford’s passcard confirmed for Max that for Captain Hawthorne, the hell of doing something was sometimes the only reason she needed. Ultimately, she did end up using it to sneak a look at the Board’s internal reports on the Groundbreaker, but that wasn’t the reason why she had done it. She had stolen the card because she could, and because it amused her to fuck with Bedford.

And apparently toying with him was another one of her favorite pastimes.

If the off-kilter flirting, mocking, and competitive arguing was the end of it, Max wouldn’t have minded so much. Competition, he understood. Ego, he was familiar with. He wasn’t the only ambitious priest who climbed their way up the ranks of the OSI, and he had fostered rivalries before.

What infuriated him was that sometimes Alex Hawthorne did something that made it easy for him to _like_ her.

Sometimes she asked him questions about the Architect and the Universal Equation, and she would actually listen while he summarized the findings of the preeminent scholars. And he could see that she _understood_ what he was saying, instead of getting that glazed over look Parvati got the few times she asked him about Scientism for the sake of polite conversation. Hawthorne would listen, and then press him for _his_ interpretations. Like she was interested in what he thought.

Sometimes Captain Hawthorne would seek him out to posit her own theories that, even if they contradicted him, presented him with something he had been starved of for years – a _challenge_. There were precious times the Captain put her mockery and games aside, and the Vicar hadn’t expected to be able to debate Teology and moral relativism with a woman who basically amounted to a pirate, but like a starving man he chased down every scrap of it he could.

Sometimes she would ask about his past, still bluntly, but as she listened to him explain that his parents were laborers and that they had been… disappointed when he took his vocation, she seemed genuinely interested and let him speak freely without turning it into another battle of wits.

Sometimes she acted more like a friend than a rival, and despite himself he could feel his guard slip. Could feel that he wanted to lower his defenses.

“I want to ask you something about the OSI.”

“Of course, Captain.”

“Do they enforce celibacy amongst their priests?”

And sometimes – no, in fact every time – she made him deeply regret every inch of ground he lost to her.

“Does my celibacy or lack thereof interest you, Captain?”

He didn’t know someone could make an innocent look feel so fucking filthy. “That’s why I’m asking, Vicar.”

He sighed. His usual defense was to counter her winking, sly insinuations by being as matter-of-fact as possible. If he wasn’t embarrassed, she didn’t win. She was only trying to provoke a reaction out of him after all.

“No, the Order of Scientific Inquiry does not require its members to be celibate. Generally.”

She looked intrigued. “Generally?”

“Some priests choose to include a celibacy clause into their contract of duties to the OSI. It’s more common amongst the higher branches of the clergy. Usually, the ability to sacrifice or abstain from a vice is a strong recommendation that one is ready for stricter responsibilities.”

He watched her blink as she sifted quickly through the ‘legalese bullshit’, as she liked to call it, and her brow knit together as she parsed the true meaning behind his words. “And… _you_ decided to have a celibacy clause?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

He wasn’t sure why she wanted to know or if she would use this against him later, but despite his misgivings he found himself answering her honestly.

“My superiors recommended I pursue one in order to make it easier for my requests to access banned and sensitive texts to be approved. The Order was more likely to ascertain my motives for study to be pure, if I showed my character to be… pure.”

She looked shocked, which in turn surprised and irritated him. What about his situation was so alien or upsetting to her that she should wear a look of shock? He was about to fire back some snappy remark to turn the focus of the conversation away from him, when he heard her voice drop a register. It sounded dark and twisted something inside of him.

“And are you pure, Maximillian?”

He shivered, and that seemed to be all the answer she wanted, as that smirk crept onto her face again and she stood up to leave with a mischievous glint in her eye.

***

“Never anger a man of the cloth!”

The shotgun barked in his hands and he saw the marauder’s chest explode in a spray of red. He could dimly hear the sounds of laser fire around him, muffled yells, and dull thuds as bodies hit the ground.

He was only half-aware, his senses washed in fury and making his skin and face feel hot. Firing another shotgun blast, the marauder’s body jerked backwards and then finally collapsed to the ground in a spinning mess of limbs. With a sneer, he kicked the pistol out of their hand for good measure, even though he knew they were dead.

“Vicar.”

He looked up, the haze of battle finally starting to fade around him, and saw Captain Hawthorne’s lips moving. She called his name again, and he realized with a jolt that she had been calling a few times now.

“All clear, Captain.”

He felt betrayed by his own self, as he saw her gaze flicker down to the blood splattered all over his hands, and back up to his face. There was a curious look in her eye though, not one of fear or disgust, but something closer to being intrigued. She locked gazes with him and then nodded. As if they were finally acknowledging some kind of understanding for the first time.

“Let’s go collect our reward from Lilya then, shall we?”

***

The mood onboard the Unreliable had been celebratory. They had earned a handsome sum of bits from Lilya Hagen, and Hawthorne had declared they would be making for Monarch next. It was with the promise of chasing down his translator in Fallbrook, that the Vicar even joined the crew in the mess hall for a toast.

Ellie made some wry comment that she hadn’t expected ‘Vicky’ to be partial to a glass of Spectrum Vodka, and he saw Hawthorne’s knowing look as she filed away that nugget of information for later. He felt like there was never a truly safe moment where he could be completely off his guard around her, but Law be damned, he decided not to let that ruin his rare good mood.

“I thought priests weren’t allowed to imbibe alcohol.”

He took a slow, deliberate sip of vodka from his glass as he matched Hawthorne’s gaze, refusing to be cowed. “Captain, I don’t know what backwater outpost you came from, but you’re going to have to find an updated manual on the religious order of Halcyon. Everything you know about the priesthood seems to come from ancient religions of Old Earth.”

“Maybe I am from Old Earth. An ancient relic walking amongst you. One of Lilya’s aliens hiding in disguise.” She smirked into her tin cup of Zero Gee Brew.

He rolled his eyes. “By Verity, the day you can be sincere for more than a fucking minute, I will give up the cloth.”

“Is that a dare?”

“Isn’t it always with you, you insufferable woman?” He took another sip of his drink. “If I’m to humor you then, let me set the record straight. Scienticians are allowed to drink.”

“Unless they add a clause of abstinence into their contract, am I correct?”

That not-question was so pointed, and felt very dangerous to be so casually dropped in earshot of the entire crew, that the Vicar narrowed his eyes in warning at her. “You are.”

She suddenly stood up and jerked her head towards the hall expectantly. “Come to my quarters.”

“ _Why?_ ”

She rolled her eyes now, as if he were being obstinate and she was being perfectly reasonable propositioning him in such a brusque manner.

“Because I have something to show you on my private terminal. Let’s go.”

He felt distinctly uncomfortable, skirting a glance around the mess hall, but it seemed like the other crewmembers were busy arguing about the latest aetherwave serial, and didn’t find it odd that he would be leaving alone with the Captain. Hawthorne motioned at him impatiently, and reluctantly he got to his feet.

He had seen Hawthorne’s rooms in passing as she tended to leave her door open, but he didn’t think he had ever been inside. He felt like there was something inappropriate, something meaningful about stepping beyond the threshold into her private room, even though she strolled in without a glance behind her. He was a little surprised when she logged onto her terminal and began pulling up her communications archive.

“Here.” She gestured for him to have a seat at her desk, and perched herself on top of her bed.

He sat down hesitantly, still waiting for some kind of deception or prank to be revealed to him, but there was none. She waited patiently, nursing her Zero Gee Brew, and he went through her message logs at first with confusion, and then with mounting shock.

“You’ve been in contact with Phineas Welles this entire time?”

He looked over at her, stunned, his mind grappling with the startling revelation that they had been involved with the Board’s most wanted terrorist. She let out a shaky sigh, and then shattered his tenuous grasp of the situation again.

“I’m one of the Hope colonists. Trapped in cryo-sleep for seventy years. Thawed out.”

He felt pole-axed and didn’t know what else to say. “That’s incredible.”

She shrugged. From the listless look in her eyes, she didn’t seem to think so.

“I thought – I don’t know what I thought. Law preserve me, I never know when to believe a word you say.”

A sad little smile quirked onto her lips then. “It’s the best way to obfuscate the truth, wouldn’t you say? The more tall tales I spin, the less likely it is folks will know when I let slip the truth. Especially when the truth sounds too ridiculous to be believed.”

She was being surprisingly reasonable and open. Max felt like he had a rare opportunity to just get to know the Captain in this moment, without any of the jockeying for ego or contesting for dominance that usually came attached.

“You’re not really Alex Hawthorne then?”

“I’m not.”

“So, who are you? Really?”

She leaned back slightly, resting some of her weight on her elbows. She was watching him with a deep, sinking look in her eyes. His gut lurched when he realized a second later that it was hunger.

“Someone who woke up decades later than they were supposed to. Someone who’s been frozen for a literal lifetime. Into a world I don’t recognize or understand…” She blinked, needing to look away for a moment, her voice hushed. “Do you think your Architect knows who I am?”

Max got up from the desk and sat down beside her on the bed. “I know you don’t share my beliefs. But maybe consider that your waking up was not a mistake, that it placed you exactly where you were meant to be in the Equation.”

“Beside a preacher who I’ve been fixing to unbutton ever since I saw him slip and lose his temper?”

Max suddenly felt his face get very hot. She hadn’t moved, but he felt trapped by her gaze. One of her fingers tapped lightly against the tin cup she held in her hand, and she looked upon him with a thirst that had nothing to do with the remnants of her drink.

“You are one of the most rigid men I’ve ever met, Vicar. I would have found that mighty boring, until I saw glimpse of something underneath. What have you got buried so deep under there? That you need to strap it down with the Law, and your dogma, and your thrice-damned contract?”

She was asking, but her questions felt like slinking attacks. Like she already had an answer in mind and she was setting them down as traps for him. His throat felt completely dry.

“What are you hoping to find?”

She chuckled and threw her head back, her voice wicked and biting. “A loophole.”

He was taken aback. “A what?”

“A loophole in your _celibacy clause_ , Vicar…”

She had pulled herself up and closer to him. Every inch of ground he had lost to her, she was eating up and closing in until she was within striking distance. He felt his breath catch in his throat. She noticed, and the look she gave him made thunder roar in his ears.

She reached out a finger to scratch along the buttons on the collar of his vestments. He felt like he was being crushed under the full weight of a planet’s gravity, unable to move, unable to push her hand away.

“Have I been sincere long enough for you to take this off?”

His words fell out, thick and clumsy. “You’re still thinking about some fucking dare?”

She scooted back a little from him, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him with that ‘innocent’ look that was anything but. “It seems clear you’re kept from acting on any carnal desire, but what if you were simply ministering to one of your flock?”

“I-I beg your pardon?”

“What if I need to make a confession? I need some spiritual guidance? What if it’s your duty to tend to me? Teach me about the Equation. And I learn best _hands-on_.”

Her tin cup of Zero Gee Brew was lost somewhere on the floor. Even though she was still wearing every stitch of her clothing, there was a rawness radiating from her that sent a traitorous stirring through his body.

“That isn’t how it works.”

Even he thought the excuse sounded lame, and she seemed to share that sentiment as she huffed and slithered to the floor. His eyes widened as she knelt on the ground and took his hand, moving it up along the nape of her neck.

“I want to make a confession, Vicar… teach me how…”

There was only so much fight he could put up, and with his fingers running through her hair, with her _on her fucking knees_ in front of him, the Captain that so liked to push his buttons and get under his skin and make him fucking squirm, and now she was here practically begging…

His mind finally seemed to grasp onto that thought, his nerves on fire, and his entire body focused in on that one desire. His fingers tightened in her hair, pulling her head back, and in a low voice he growled, “ _Beg_.”

She looked positively delighted, and he jerked her head back further in warning.

“You begin confession by begging for forgiveness.”

“Please,” her voice came out in a breathy, excited whisper, “Please.”

Those soft words threatened to undo something within him, and Max hit that mental wall of ‘ _fuck it_ ’ with a shuddering blow. He reached for her, both his hands now framing her face and he brought her up to meet him, their lips an inch apart, his breath gusting hot against her skin.

That devilish ‘I won’ smirk crept across her face, and he felt his heart drop into his stomach when she remarked in a wry tone, “So, the preacher’s just a man after all.”

“ _Damn you_.”

He dropped her face, getting up to his feet with a swift, swooping sensation of fury and humiliation that burned so hot it made him feel nauseous. A chorus of voices inside his head roared at him of how stupid could he have been, what a bad idea this had been from the start, of fucking course this was _another game_.

And she won. She always fucking won.

He left her quarters, her throaty chuckle haunting his steps as he beat a hasty retreat.


	2. Chapter 2

Captain Hawthorne slowly lowered the tin cup of Rum and Somethin’ from her lips, and one of her eyebrows rose into a slant. Her tone was light, but only a fool would have been unable to pick up the thread of danger running through it.

“Did you just threaten me with eternal damnation, Vicar?”

“I wasn’t threatening you, Captain, there’s no need for dramatics. I was merely explaining the OSI’s tenet of predetermination.” The Vicar smoothly answered, unruffled by the steel behind her otherwise amused smirk.

Hawthorne wasn’t going to let him him wriggle off the hook that easily though, and gestured to Nyoka. “Our preacher here must think I’m pig-ignorant and can’t make meaning of his fancy words.”

Nyoka merely shrugged, taking a swig out of whatever fuel thinner she had collected into her cup. “Cystipigs are pretty fucking clever all things considered.”

Seeing that Nyoka wasn’t going to be much help, and this was really just a spar between the two of them anyway, the Captain turned to Max again. “Well according to your ‘tenet of predetermination’, I’m fairly certain you just implied that I’m damning myself with my own actions. And I’m wounded, Vicar. I’m as wholesome as mock-apple pie.”

He serenely folded his hands on top of the table. “You can’t think of any _deceptions_ you’ve carried out, ‘Captain Hawthorne’?”

He watched her bite back a chuckle and her lips purse into an amused ‘oooh’. “Are you calling me a bullshitter, Max?”

“Clearly. _Hawthorne_.”

Her eyes flashed, and then she made a rude gesture with her hand. “Did you predetermine this, you holier-than-thou prick?”

“Obviously.”

Nyoka laughed at their antics, picked up the Captain’s neglected cup of Rum and Somethin’ and finished it off for her. “Law search me why you two idiots’ idea of fun is to throw the dictionary at each other, but you’re letting your drink get warm. And that’s the real sin.”

“Our preacher here thinks I’m a wicked deceiver and I’ll be punished for my lying ways.”

He let out a long-suffering sigh and pushed himself away from the table. “You wound me with your over-simplification, but if that’s the easiest way for you to interpret the Grand Plan, then by all means. I don’t think you’re stupid, Captain, though you certainly like to put up the front.”

“You wound _me_ , Vicar.”

“I think you know that by deviating from the role you’ve been given, you’ve just opened yourself to more hardship and suffering. It’s not that difficult a concept to grasp. Do you think the fact that you barely sleep at night and instead roam the ship until Law forsaken hours in the morning is a secret? Maybe if you stopped running from yourself, you would find some measure of peace.”

The Captain’s face froze. She still wore an amused smirk, but he could see it was taking her effort to keep it in place. This was happening more and more frequently between them. The usual goading and bickering that was par for the course would suddenly cross into serious territory and then dance right back. He wasn’t sure where the demarcation line was anymore, of what was ‘off-limits’, and he doubted Hawthorne knew either.

Mostly, he didn’t care. It felt good to get his jabs in where he could.

“I don’t think I like this particular sermon, Vicar.”

He stood up and pointedly adjusted the cuffs to his blue vestments. “Then maybe you should have thought twice before bringing a priest onboard your ship?”

Captain Hawthorne snatched her cup back from Nyoka and drained the last dregs. She threw a filthy wink back at Max. “Oh it’s worth it so I can stare at your ass while you do your little shotgun trick.”

Max’s eyes rolled so hard, he was surprised he didn’t faint. “If you ever tire of deflection and want to talk sincerely, I’m here.”

He could hear the Captain laugh as she called to his retreating form. “But deflection and liquor make for such a good pair!”

***

He could hear her patrol the ship at night. Her distracted, lost footsteps paced up and down each level, well on into morning. That was one thing Captain Hawthorne hadn’t been able to get the hang of: sleep.

For a few nights he’d stayed up late to read and ignored it. Tonight, he could hear her pacing and it annoyed him. It felt like a hot prickle between his shoulder blades and he realized he couldn’t stop thinking about how annoyed and pissed off he was at her. And that maybe she wasn’t sleeping because she was afraid to. Afraid of being frozen again and unable to wake up.

_Shit_.

It was even more irritating that he couldn’t be left to hate her in peace. When he heard her footsteps close by as her aimless wandering brought her into the mess hall, he opened the door to his room and called out into the hall.

“Grab a bottle of Spectrum Vodka and bring a glass for me.”

He heard the footsteps still for a long moment. Then the sound of cupboard doors opening and the clink of glasses.

When she came inside, she sat down across from him as if this was just a casual late-night drink between two friends. He wondered if they could maintain that illusion long enough to have a civil time. They’d been capable of it before. And she looked weary, the steady stream of 2-Hour Energy Brew and Focusitol capsules keeping her alert, but taking their toll. He’d never seen Captain Hawthorne defanged, but this looked as close as he’d ever get.

She silently poured them both a drink and clinked her glass to his in cheers before handing it to him. She looked grateful for the momentary ceasefire.

They drank in silence for a few minutes, and it was disarmingly peaceful.

Finally, she said, “Our next stop is Fallbrook.”

Max nodded graciously, accepting the olive branch. “Thank you.”

She drained her glass just a bit too quickly for his liking. He placed a hand over hers when she reached for the bottle. “Give me a chance to keep pace with you, Alex.”

Perhaps it was because he used her name, or rather, the name she had adopted, but she let out a soft noise of self-disgust and relinquished her hold on the bottle. She leaned back into her chair, a searching look on her face and sounded out, “Alex.”

“Have you gotten used to it yet?”

She nodded. “It fit me quicker than I reckoned. Now sometimes I forget what I was called before.”

“It must be difficult, to have to assume a new identity… hide in plain sight. I think I may have been hard on you, and not appreciated what a burden that can be.”

She gave him a peculiar, twisted smile that made him feel ashamed of every time he had said something purely to hurt her feelings in the past. “I seem naturally talented at bending the truth, don’t I, Max?”

He merely shrugged, what would be the point in pretending otherwise?

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost the ability to speak the truth at all.”

He looked at her curiously. “Why don’t you try it now? Say a true thing.”

She laughed softly. “I’m an ass to you.”

He smiled in acknowledgment. “Very good. Say another true thing.”

She leaned her head back so she could look up at the ceiling, her arms loosely crossed against her chest. “I haven’t been touched by another human being in over seventy years. I’m starved for it. It seems a silly thing, complaining about not being laid in all that time, but it’s like my skin is thirsting. It aches.”

Max blinked. It took him a long time to recover his voice. “It is natural. And I think you do have options. Felix, or even Dr. Fenhill if my suspicions are correct-“

“I’ve considered it,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s not unheard of, for crewmembers to knock boots. It wouldn’t be entirely out of order.”

He was caught off-guard with how casually honest she was being, and he suspected it would only last for this one conversation. “So, why haven’t you pursued one of them?”

Her eyes flickered over to his, and they both _knew_.

She looked away first and laughed self-consciously. “Ask me to say another true thing.”

He obliged. “Please, say another true thing.”

She sat back upright in her chair so that she faced him directly. He could feel that stirring in his gut again, hot and anxious.

“That night. What I was doing… was giving you an out. I reckoned it was the right thing to do.”

She took the bottle and poured a finger of vodka into her glass, and he didn’t have the will to stop her. Her words had turned him inside and out. She knocked back the drink in one shot with an air of finality and stood up.

“Thank you for the drink, Vicar.”

***

“It’s too late for that. I threw away my life chasing fairy tales. Will punishing you fix any of that? Of course not, but by Law, it will make me feel a whole lot better.”

Felix glanced nervously at the Captain and tried to get her attention. “Uh, Cap? Maybe you should stop him?”

But Max had tunnel-visioned. The world around him had faded to a dull roar, and he felt anger lick up his insides, hot and all consuming. He grabbed the front of Reginald Chaney’s shirt, and only dully registered the feeling of his fist crushing into the side of the other man’s face.

“Whoa! Fuck! Max, cut it out!”

“Leave it, Felix. Let the man work it out.”

Max barely registered their words, though a small part of him seemed to roar more fiercely at the Captain’s tacit approval, and he continued to pummel the tar out of the low-life piece of shit that had played this dirty trick on him.

His. Whole. Life. Had. Been. A. Mockery. He accentuated each shamed, hateful word with another blow.

He couldn’t remember when Reginald stopped groaning in pain. He couldn’t remember when the other man fell limp in his hands and slumped to the ground. Years of pain, doubt, of _suffering_ he had felt, he was striking a promise onto this villain’s body that he would redeem all of the dignity that he had lost.

“Get back to the ship, Felix.”

Max felt a hand on his shoulder, and in slow waves he felt the world come back to his senses. He realized he had also collapsed to the ground, his knees hitting dirt. His knuckles were torn open and stung. He was breathing heavily.

His eyes refocused and he saw Reginald’s still form in front of him. The man’s face was a red mask of blood, swollen beyond recognition. He had beaten Reginald until the man resembled a sack of boarstwurst. Max felt his stomach flip in disgust.

“He’s still breathing.” The Captain’s voice seemed somewhere far away.

“I don’t care,” he spat. Though, a small part of him knew that he would in time. When the anger faded completely.

There was an insistent tug on his arm, and he allowed Hawthorne to pull him to his feet. He looked at her, his green eyes dark and stormy with years of pent up fury that had been unleashed and was still searching for release.

He only had a second to think that she had a strange look on her face, when she grabbed his collar with both hands and pulled him into a bruising kiss. He sunk into her, like a drowning man gasping for air, and gripped her sides hard enough to leave a mark.

He doesn’t remember what they did with Reginald Chaney. If Hawthorne put in a tip at the SubLight office that someone needed medical attention, or if they just left him to bleed out in the creek. Although, he suspects the former over the latter.

He doesn’t remember how they got back onboard the Unreliable, or being ushered into a shower to wash away the blood staining his hands, his face, and even his hair.

He remembers pulling off her shirt and tracing his fingers over the marks he left on her hips. That she pulled him in again and with urgent whispers, encouraged him to leave more. He remembers picking her up and throwing her against the wall, her armor and storage bins scattering over the floor, and how glorious it felt to not _fucking care_.

“Maximillian…”

The way she teased out his name in a drawl made him feel like he would gladly do whatever she asked of him. Even follow her into the heart of a blackhole.

“I… I can’t let you – the Order, your work, you—“

He relished every stutter in her words as she struggled to form a coherent thought against his ministrations. Every crack in her resolve, every soft gasp that tore from her throat, only made him desperate to illicit more.

_More, more, more._

“I’ve already broken my vows today,” he gasped against her neck. “Break another with me.”

And she nodded, wordless, and pulled him back to her with starved hands and lips. He fell into her with a renewed sense of determination to hear every cry, gasp, moan – every pleading sound he had caught a hint of, given full voice by his touch.

He had spent years of his life searching for answers, chasing immutable riddles and thirsting for some insight that would explain the hollowness he felt in his spot in the Everything of it all. He had pored over countless texts, lived in fear of being exiled by the Order, sent to prison for flirting with heresy, _beat a man an inch to his death_ for a fucking scrap of the truth.

And all it took was this woman tracing his name with her lips against his ear, panting so prettily, her heart beating erratically under his skin, for all of that to be rendered meaningless. He didn’t care, _couldn’t_ care about anything else, while the woman he knew as Alex cried out underneath him and he realized the only Law-damned thing he cared about in the Universal Equation was to be buried as deeply as he could within that jagged peal of desire.

***

He hadn’t known what to expect afterward, and assumed Hawthorne would want to pretend like it had never happened and they would resume their usual bickering, with the mind games maybe having an extra layer of _something_.

And up to a point, he was correct. Hawthorne came swinging, with a hungry look in her eye and a dirty register to her laugh, dropping thinly veiled insinuations over the mess table that sent hot bolts of anticipation into his gut. Her game felt more dangerous now. Whether in private or in front of others, she didn’t seem to care one whit, she had decided to wage a campaign of trying to enrage him until he lost control and fucked her senseless.

It worked on two more occasions.

The once, she hadn’t really needed to try very hard, as he had already been distracted with memories of what they had done and what he wanted to do again. A few jabs about him being an unstable wildcard and whether or not she could trust him to be on her crew, and she had gotten what she wanted when he slammed her against the wall of his room and transformed her mocking laughs into desperate groans.

The second time had stung. They were traveling across the hills of Scylla, and fighting their way through some of the more homicidal wildlife. She had been looking at him in an interested fashion, and perhaps he had given into a false sense of security with where he stood with her. When there was a lull in their journey, he had pulled her close to him and placed a teasing kiss on her lips. There seemed to be a new, playful element they were exploring, but then he was hip-to-hip with her and he heard that Law damned chuckle.

He looked at her confused and saw that _fucking smirk_.

“Are you trying to make love to me, Max?”

The biting, sharp purr to her voice eventually transformed into delighted gasps as she got the hate-fuck in the fields she wanted.

He was in a dark mood the rest of the journey to the hermit’s hut, though if he was honest, he was angry with himself and no one else.

***

And then the Vicar Maximillian DeSoto saw visions inside that hut, of his mother, of _himself_ , and the bottom of the world he knew fell away and he dropped through it, falling, falling into the unknown…

***

“Are… are you alright, Max?”

He looked up and saw Captain Hawthorne standing awkwardly by his door. He nodded. “I am. Thank you, Captain.”

She squirmed, not knowing what to do with her arms, and settled for crossing them against her chest. He knew she had come with genuine concern for his wellbeing, but that she wouldn’t be able to sit in that for very long.

As he expected, she then tried to deflect with a laugh. “So, was that your first time getting high? Or is that another secret from prison?”

He didn’t give into her bait, instead offering her a sincere smile. “I had a chance to speak with my mother, in a way that I haven’t been able to while she was living. It was very healing. Thank you. I would not have had that experience without your help.”

Hawthorne looked taken aback, and even a little frightened. She snapped, her voice tight. “Alright, don’t get soft on me now, Vicar. You know that wasn’t _actually_ your mother, right? It was a figment of your imagination, a fucking hallucination. Whatever grand awakening you’ve just had, came from you spending four hours in some hermit’s hut having a conversation with yourself.”

If she was hoping that would have brought back the rage she was familiar and comfortable with, this time he disappointed her. Max merely shook his head, feeling sorry for her.

“Alex, why do you need me to be angry? Why is that the part of me you’re drawn to?”

She looked like he had slapped her, and the surprised hurt turned swiftly into a darker fury. She felt humiliated, he suspected, and she did not like the feeling. “Who says I’m drawn to you?”

He simply looked at her and as the silence drew out between them, he saw her squirm uncomfortably and then look away. Even she couldn’t feed that lie with any conviction.

“I’m here for you. But I won’t be a practice dummy for you to work out your frustrations on. Or be an accomplice to whatever self-destruction you’re fixing for.”

“Fine, then don’t be,” she snarled, turning on her heel to leave.

“What did you see? Dr. Fenhill said that you were also experiencing some kind of hallucination. It took awhile to revive you.”

He saw her back and shoulders tense as his question caught her at the doorway. She stood there for a moment, battling with an answer, but then left without turning to look back.

***

Hawthorne avoided him for the next few days, and a few times he wondered if she would ever speak to him again beyond the curt commands of “gear up” or “watch the flank”. The other crew members picked up on the iciness and mostly reacted to it by pretending it didn’t exist.

Hawthorne wanted to pretend it didn’t bother her either, but he heard her own footsteps name her a liar as she endlessly paced at night.

Finally, one night he saw her shadow block the light entering underneath the door to his room, and heard the hesitant knock a moment later. She came in, a little embarrassed, but with deep circles under her eyes that painted a clear picture of what she had been struggling with since Scylla.

He gestured to one of his chairs, but instead she gently tugged on his sleeve and brought them both over to perch onto his bunk. He felt her shudder as she leaned into his shoulder, skin seeking skin.

Her voice sounded hollow. “I saw myself in the cryo tube.”

He had been wondering which version of Captain Hawthorne had come seeking his company that night. Which prickly defenses or mocking barbs or weaponized flirting he would have to fend off. He hadn’t expected the days of brittle antagonism and tense silence to be swept away with one whispered confession, but she defied most patterns in the Universal Equation. He wrapped an arm around Alex and brought her in closer, silently willing away her fears.

“I was choking in it, banging on the glass, trying to get out. I could see… all of the other pods. The other colonists. Some of their pods just _shattered_. Some of them burning, I could hear people screaming, banging on the glass trying to get out—“

Her voice died in her throat. It took her a long time to find it again.

“I’m the only one that woke up. I’m the only chance they have at getting to live again. A whole colony of people are my responsibility. Every choice I make, every time I fuck up, every time I get distracted or feel indulgent…”

Her cheeks burned. It did sound like she meant the few moments they had stolen, but she stumbled past that slip-up. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing or why it’s fallen to me. If your Architect is real, they’ve got a fucked up sense of humor. I can’t believe that this was meant to come to me. Not when I feel so Law forsaken _bad_ at it.”

She looked up at him then. There were no tears in her eyes, but they had a fierce shine in them like it was a close thing. “Whatever peace you found in that crazy dream… I wish I had found it too.”

He lifted up a curled finger to stroke against her cheek.

“I was forced to confront the truth of what I’ve been doing. That all of my searching, reading, hunting, learning – was me running away from what I already knew. What I didn’t want to admit. Now that I’m no longer warring with myself, I feel at peace. What are you running from, Alex?”

She shook her head mutely.

“I may not have said it as kindly before, but I don’t think I was completely off the mark. You’re running from yourself. Maybe you wouldn’t feel so torn… if you didn’t have so many lies you told yourself.”

She looked like she wanted to argue back, but she couldn’t. She was too raw, too opened up, like an exposed nerve. She may not have liked what he was saying, but she didn’t have the effort to keep up her many masks.

“I’m tired, Max.”

His lips quirked into a small smile. “Now that sounds true. If you’d like, I’ll walk you back to your room.”

Instead, her fingers curled around his collar and she brought her face up to whisper a kiss against his lips. It felt like a fragile thing that grew firmer and more urgent until he gently pulled her away with a hand on her shoulder.

“What do you want?” He asked.

“You know what I want.”

“Say it.”

He saw a stricken look flash across her face, before her brow furrowed. She wasn’t able to, was still hiding too many things within herself to be able to voice something so halting and vulnerable aloud.

“Are you afraid to admit it to me,” he asked gently, “or are you afraid to admit it to yourself?”

She buried her face deeper into his shoulder and whispered, “shut up” which was as close to an answer as she was going to give.

***

Captain Hawthorne managed to regain her footing over the next few days and was back to her normal, swashbuckling self. It seemed she had also made some kind of amends with the Vicar, as the crew noted they were no longer ignoring the other’s existence. She still bickered with him, though it took on a less personal tone. After his experience in Scylla, it seemed impossible for anyone to provoke him in his ‘zen state’. Not even Felix’s Philosophist rantings or defense of ‘superlatively inferior’ tossball teams could get him worked up anymore.

“Law as my witness, I confess I miss the old grumpy version of you,” Ellie had wryly remarked.

“I’m still the same person, Dr. Fenhill. Just with more clarity.”

Ellie pretended to snore very loudly in order to drown him out.

The Vicar bore the jokes with good grace. He didn’t think it was a bad thing to become friendlier with the crew. And he watched as the Captain also began to thaw, little by little. Her progress on some days was positively glacial, and her first instinct when threatened was still to deflect or lash out, but with a bit of effort she was growing more comfortable in her own skin.

When they raided the Ministry of Accuracy and Morale’s research labs and successfully retrieved a canister of dimethyl sulfoxide, she beamed with a hopefulness that made his heart break. Her fingers had sought out his and squeezed them. There was an odd, but buoyant, tone to her voice that he had never heard before.

“I can wake them up, Max.”

She had given him such an open, untarnished smile that it took him a moment to fight back the urge to kiss her. Hard.

She sent the dimethyl sulfoxide back to the Unreliable and was scanning through the research terminals in the lab to collate any notes on the compound, when she dug into some archived logs about Dr. Welles. He watched as her brow furrowed, her eyes flicking back and forth rapidly as she hunted down more information. A hardened look came over her face.

“What is it?”

“Phineas he…” She drew back from the terminal as if it could contaminate her. “…he killed them.”

“What?”

She looked like she was going to be sick. “He killed twelve of the Hope’s colonists, experimenting on them… just burning through them like they were expendable.” The confusion and disbelief on her face gave way to a rising rage. “I wasn’t the first. I was just the first to _survive_ him.”

“Alex-“

“I’m not Alex.” Her eyes blazed with a cold fury that made him take a step back. She closed down the terminal and pushed past him, wanting to put as much distance between herself and the research lab as she could.

***

“Captain, don’t do this.”

From the firm set of her jaw, and the steel fury still lining her face, he could see he wasn’t reaching through to her.

“Law, damn it!” Max slammed a hand down on her command console, trying to get her attention. “Alex! You would throw away everything you’ve been working toward – you would sacrifice all of the Hope’s colonists, just to spite one man?”

She looked like she was about to swing out and strike him, but fought down the impulse. Her voice had a clenched, suffocated sound to it. “I was blindly following the orders of a murderer. The Board was right! Welles was just some mad scientist – a fucking terrorist who was using me as a means to an end! How do I know anything he was saying was true? How do I know he wasn’t just using me as a pawn in some larger game of his? Do you know? Tell me!”

Her chest heaved and she realized she was yelling. She was surprised by her own outburst.

“I know you feel betrayed, Alex. Maybe what you’re saying is right. But is giving Welles up to the Board going to undo any of it?”

“Of course not.” He felt a chill run down his spine as he heard his own words echoed in her voice. “But it will make me feel a whole lot better.”

He grasped her hand before she could punch in the command to hail Adjutant Akande. “As a man who was enslaved by his anger for most of his life, please listen to me when I say that revenge is a hollow prize.”

She yanked her hand out of his, a defiant look on her face. “When I met you, you were a Board-loving, rulebook-following, man of the Law. Why are you trying to stop me from doing what they want now?”

“Because I came to know you—don’t look away from me.” He saw her eyes snap back to his, uncomfortable with the earnestness and heat pouring off his words. “If the other colonists from the Hope are a thing like you, we need them. If they can accomplish a fraction of what you have, we need them.”

She let out a hollow, defeated laugh. “Need them? People who were never meant to be in this time or place? We don’t belong here. We didn’t have a hand in making this world, and we shouldn’t have a hand in its ruination. There are just pods full of more mouths to feed and we’ve already seen there ain’t enough to keep Halcyon from starving.”

“Don’t pretend like you’re doing this for the sake of the Halcyon colony.” He sounded angry, and she looked startled that she had finally teased anger out of him again, but it was directed at her. “Don’t condemn all these people for the sake of your wounded pride.”

Her fist did come flying towards him now, and he had to take a step to the side to avoid being hit. She grabbed the front of his shirt and snarled, an inch from his face. “Who are you to lecture me about _pride?_ ”

“Alex,” he tried to plead with her one last time. “I’m begging you. Don’t do this. I can’t stand by your side and let you do this.”

She looked at him, unmoved. Made up of ice. “Then leave.”

She turned her back to him and ordered ADA to open a private communication line with the Adjutant.

With the feeling like he was carrying a sorrowful weight in the pit of his stomach, the Vicar Max renounced the Captain and walked off the Unreliable. He wondered if he had failed her, and felt guilt gnaw at his bones. He wondered if she had _failed him_ , and felt anger like an itch inside his skull.

He mourned for the person he left behind, who he no longer felt he knew. What had they been, friends? Lovers? He did not know. He only knew that she had been important and that this was a great loss.


	3. Chapter 3

It had been many long years since the Vicar had seen Captain Hawthorne, and he watched as she tried to find some way to awkwardly exist in his space while he brewed a pot of spiced mock-apple cider.

“I heard the Adjutant had offered you a high position in the OSI. She was fixing to make you a Bishop, at one time.”

The years had not softened her blunt, demanding nature. He found it annoying and familiar all at once, to be spoken to in that curiously bullheaded fashion of hers, as if there had been no great distance between the last time they had conversed and now.

“At one time I would have found that a great honor.”

She took the offered cup of spiced cider and sniffed it. “No Rum and Somethin’ in this? Pity.” She sipped at the hot drink despite her complaint. “Akande wasn’t very thrilled to have her generosity spat on.”

“I’m sure she found a way to get over it. The real prize was to have you on her retainer, after all.”

Hawthorne winced a little. “I’m still an independent contractor.”

“Yes, but when you made certain that the only real player left was the Board, you’re effectively their employee. Just with less paperwork.”

To his surprise, she merely nodded, a grimace pulling onto her lips, as she didn’t deny his bitter words. He frowned at her, suspicious. Waiting to see what kind of trap she was trying to lure him into with this concession.

“You’re right. I didn’t want to play someone else’s game, but despite what I wanted… my choice had consequences.”

“Brava. The Captain has finally learned about accountability. Years too late, may I add.” He could hear the growing snarl in his voice, and he took a few deep breaths to calm himself down. It had only taken her a few minutes to disturb the meditative poise he had built up over the years. She had an innate talent to bring chaos and disruption to everything she touched. She defied order.

_Law_ , he had missed that.

“I’m not interested in whatever new scheme or plot you’ve gotten involved in, and I confess, I can’t fathom why you would want me to participate.”

Her eyes sparkled above the rim of her cup as she kept drinking the spiced mock-apple cider she had already teased him about. Sipping at it as if she honestly liked the taste. “This isn’t the first time I’ve wanted to seek you out, you know. There were many times I was fixing to find you.”

He looked at her accusingly. Daring her to continue saying such seductive words that made his gut twist and his anger simmer.

“I reckon I can tell you I need you because I can’t hack a Law forsaken computer worth a damn. Or that I need your shotgun backing me up as I walk into the biggest fight I’ve ever taken on. But I’m trying this new thing, being honest…”

She looked at him with a smile he didn’t understand, and he felt like the world was closing in around him. He desperately didn’t want her to finish her sentence, but he also felt like he would suffocate if she didn’t.

“…I missed you something fierce, Maximillian.” And, even more poisonous, “Haven’t you missed me?”

“No.” _Yes_.

She smirked, like she could hear the silent word he kept trapped behind his teeth. She looked at him, her eyes searching, as if she could read a story on his face. “Over the years I have kept an ear low the ground, paying for information in little drips and drabs, and I’ve got a lead. Not all of the Hope colonists are dead. The Board kept some. Stored them somewhere secret.”

He was stunned. Whatever harebrained scheme he had expected her to bring to his door, the Hope colonists had never once crossed his mind.

“I’ve paid a lot of bribes to finally get someone to tell me where they are… And I’ve found a source where I can get some more dimethyl sulfoxide.”

Max’s voice came out in a hush. “How many are left?”

“Ten,” she said and her voice almost broke. “There’s ten still frozen. Ten that can still be woken up. Help me, Max. Please.”

***

Max stepped into the cockpit of the Unreliable, where Hawthorne was charting a course on her nav-map with ADA. She turned to look at him, a surprised smile lighting on her face when she saw that he had shaven his face clean.

“Are you going to get rid of everything I compliment?”

“Funny, it had very little to do with your opinion.” He rubbed a finger along his jaw line, where his skin was now smooth. Though he thought his beard had made him look distinguished, getting rid of it had taken years off his frame. He now looked almost identical to the Vicar who had been on the Unreliable before, with maybe just a few more streaks of gray in his hair.

“Now who’s being a liar?” She asked mischievously, before turning her attention back to her map.

“They’re being stored on Byzantium?” He asked, scanning the map.

“No, but the dimethyl sulfoxide is. Ellie will have secured it by now. We’ll be picking her up and then making for Monarch.”

He was surprised. “Who else has agreed to come back?”

“Nyoka.” Her mouth had set into a tense line. He realized she was ashamed that she had no more names to list. Without knowing what possessed him, he laid a hand on her shoulder and he felt her relax. A troubled sigh escaped her lips and she rubbed the side of her face. “Parvati won’t speak to me. Felix went AWOL, no one knows where is now. And SAM broke. Law damned piece of junk.”

There was a deep sense of regret in her voice that he suspected she would never have been comfortable allowing another soul to hear previously. But having broken loyalties and lost friendships in her dogged pursuit of whatever path in the universe was meant for her, the Captain sounded weary that she had condemned herself to doing it on her lonesome.

“So you want just the four of us to pull off what is amounting to be a fucking miracle?”

He saw a ghost of a smile hover back onto her face at his coarse words. “Then Law be praised I have a preacher back on my side.”

***

“Nyoka! Shit!”

Ellie turned and urgently waved the Captain onward, already kneeling down at Nyoka’s side. “It’s alright, I’ve got her. Just go! We’ll hold the door!”

Hawthorne looked torn, but Max grabbed her by the arm and pulled her towards the direction of the lab. Nyoka had been shot in the leg, but they wouldn’t be able to do a better job of patching her up than Ellie. And there were UDL reinforcements on their way.

“Alex, the colonists!”

That seemed to jolt her back to her senses and she nodded grimly, jogging into the bowels of the storage facility, reminded of her goal.

It had been years since he had defended himself with anything more lethal than a tossball stick, but Max had quickly readjusted to having a shotgun in his grip. They blasted their way through the few unfortunate security guards that had been posted inside the storage warehouse, and found the locked compartment that had the Hope cryo pods.

He saw Captain Hawthorne stop in front of the pods and place a hand on top of them reverently.

“Hook them up.”

Hacking into a facility terminal, he quickly opened up a line with ADA back on the Unreliable. Hawthorne had kept Phineas Welles’ revival program, and they needed to run it now for the dimethyl sulfoxide to be administered correctly. She snapped the canisters into the cryo pod’s pharmaceutical receiving ports with a steely-eyed determination.

He remembered when they had done this the first time. The heartbreaking look of hope she had on her face that had burned itself into his memory like a brand.

This time she looked grim. Perhaps there was hope there still, but it was tempered by the resolve of someone who had been given a chance to redeem themselves of the failure that had haunted them the most. The colonist being brought of cryo in front of her was the salvation she had not dared hope to find. 

She saw warmth and colour flood onto the comatose colonist’s face, and he watched as her eyes widened and her lips parted. It looked like she was about to call out his name.

But then the colonist’s face began to turn blue. Their body twitched, then began to seize violently. They were suffocating, choking. Something was going wrong.

“No. No!”

He heard something broken in her voice, a note of primal terror that didn’t sound altogether human, as she began to pound on the glass of the pod. As if she could break it open with just her fists.

Max tried to pull her away, but she fought him off, her fingers scrabbling against the glass and an eerie howl ripped from her throat as she watched bloody foam come out of the colonist’s mouth before they stopped moving.

“Please, please, please…”

She ran to the next pod that was going through its wake cycle and began pounding on its glass too. She screamed at them to wake up, to please wake up, to not leave her alone.

Eventually she sank to the floor, her hands bloodied, and screamed until her throat closed up and she couldn’t make anymore sound. He gathered her into his arms, spooked, having never seen her so raw, so naked, so _fucking exposed_. He looked at the dead pods around them and felt like he had taken a step into the nightmare she had once described for him a long time ago.

Ellie and Nyoka, limping but otherwise fine, eventually found them. The Captain was almost catatonic, her face streaked with tears, but her eyes hollow as she had shut down in Max’s arms, unable to register any more horror.

***

In the end, seven of the colonists died, unable to survive the reawakening cycle after spending so long in cryo-sleep. Three pods, three colonists, maintained weak vital signs after being awoken, though they remained unconscious and barely clinging to life. Ellie did what she could to stabilize them for transport, and under more gunfire they smuggled the three surviving pods back onto the Unreliable.

Hawthorne seemed to be in a daze, and it took Max bringing her in front of the surviving pods so she could see the sleeping, but alive, colonists before she seemed to resurface out of whatever hell she had been trapped in.

Ellie had tried to warn the Captain that the colonists may still not wake up, and that any rate a lone saw-bones like her didn’t have the technology or know-how to fix them up. Hawthorne eventually agreed that they would be taken to the medical facility of Groundbreaker. The station was still independent, and while nowhere in Halcyon would be completely safe from the Board’s reach, this gave the three remaining colonists’ a fighting chance to live again.

With the promise of a plan, Hawthorne seemed to regain a bit of her composure, though he felt like there was still a brittleness running through her that threatened to snap at any moment.

He found her sitting in the cockpit, staring out the viewport of the ship. She made no comment when he entered and they sat in companionable silence for a spell.

“I suppose that’s the punishment I was owed,” she finally said, in a soft voice. “For trying to shirk my place in the equation?”

There was a peculiar smile hovering around her lips that he didn’t like the look of, as she stared somewhere faraway into the stars. “I read a few of those Scientism books you left behind. Law have mercy on me, some of their sayings ring true now. That no matter how far one strays, eventually they’ll be put back in line with the Plan. With their place in it. The more resistance you put up, the harder you’ll get snapped back.”

He thought he could hear her push down something wet and grief-stricken, her voice straining to sound light and casual. “Well, I reckon the Architect has slapped me right hard for my stubbornness. I just wish it didn’t mean the suffering of the people I was meant to help. Because that was my place in the plan… to help them.”

At one point in time, Max thought he would have been overjoyed to hear her finally subscribe to Scientism’s principles. Or felt vindicated when he heard her finally admit her failings and express some kind of guilt for the suffering she had caused.

But in this moment, he only felt deeply moved by her.

“If that is how the Plan truly works, then I was meant to be a laborer back on my home colony. I wonder then, how great my punishment has been for shirking that path. Because I don’t feel reprimanded at all.”

She looked up at him curiously, silently asking him what he meant. He reached out and curled a finger under her chin.

“Though I’ve struggled against it, denied that it was my path, it seems the universe keeps wanting to place me at your side.” He heard her breath hitch in her throat, her eyes unable to tear away from his. “So I can keep pretending like this doesn’t mean something, or I can kiss you like I’ve wanted to since I stepped foot back on this cramped, rusty ship.”

Her eyes slipped from his gaze down to his mouth.

Hunger licking inside of him, he pulled her close to him and was about to make good on his promise when he heard the whisper of a chuckle leave her lips. “I was right. You did miss me.”

“I stand corrected. Having to put up with your nonsense is my punishment from the Architect after all, you insufferable woman.”

And she kissed that fucking smirk right onto his lips hard enough to bruise. And though he knew that dark, throaty chuckle had a thread of danger in it, and that there was always a knife’s edge to walk with her, she sounded like herself again as she fought him for the upper hand – arrogant, teasing, and _alive_.

Whatever game this was, it was one they were both playing. A shared language that the Plan had written just for them.

He shivered as she placed her lips against his ear and whispered into it. It sounded like a name. Her name.

Startled, he pulled her head back, which made her eyes darken and the purr in her voice deepen, so he could look at her when he asked, “What did you say?”

“A true thing.” And she leaned forward, closing the distance between them so she was close enough to strike. “And I want to hear it again. I want to hear you say it, _Maximillian_ …”

He shuddered, helpless against the electric pull she had over him, and fell into her with a true name on his lips that he traced onto her skin and groaned aloud into the air.

The Architect and the fucking Equation could rot, if his place in the world was meant to be anywhere else other than right inside the cockpit of the Unreliable, calling the Captain’s true name again and again, like a chanted prayer.

***

**END**


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